The Fizz #59: Erin Rasmussen, winemaker at American Wine Project, is championing Wisconsin's hybrid grapes
In this issue, Erin and I speak in depth about hybrid grapes and their impact on culture and farming in America.
Wisconsin makes great wine. Although not a state noted for wine production, Wisconsin’s hybrid grape growing inspires winemakers around the country. Erin Rasmussen, winemaker at Wisconsin’s American Wine Project, is leading the conversation on these grape varieties, and the inspired wines that can be made with them. Thanks to her passion around sustainable farming, and her incredibly honest and non-dogmatic approach to winemaking, Erin’s American Wine Project is furthering conversations around hybrid grape farming, their place in wine culture, and their opportunity to contribute to a more equitable industry future.
In this issue, Erin and I touch on her journey to owning her own winery and why she chose to root back in her home state of Wisconsin. We also speak candidly about wine additives, hybrid grape farming and the future of the Wisconsin grape growing industry, as well as what’s next for Erin as she navigates her own opportunities for growth. I’m incredibly excited about this passionate and down-to-earth maker and her continued impact on our American wine landscape.
Margot: Did you grow up in a wine drinking family?
Erin: I did not. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and my parents really couldn't care less. You know how you can go to the store and there's the off brand stuff, and then there's the name brand stuff, and then there's the farmer's market version of that? They would always stick to the off brand stuff because they just didn't care—why would they spend money on something that was more thought through?
I got old enough to go to the farmer's market myself and would certainly pick and choose something that looked amazing. I also grew up as a musician, and I think my brain was sort of primed to find organization or meaning in experiences. My dad's dad made home wine—he was really interested in fermentation. There’s this really beautiful 1960s era folk winemaking book which has recipes for any kind of wine you want to make—carrot wine, dandelion wine, you know. My grandfather was really into the process of it, but no-one was buying Bordeaux or anything.
I didn't grow up with any sort of context for the wine industry. I didn't really even know it was a thing until I was out of college a few years and a friend of mine started a PhD program at Davis. She said hey, work a harvest so you can move out to California. That's how I got involved in the industry.
Margot: How did you get from your harvest experience to where you are today?
Erin: It's probably a combination of sexism, ADHD, and a stubborn streak. I traveled and took advice, and I didn't always have money to do things like go to U.C. Davis for a graduate degree. I did a one year graduate program in New Zealand. The biggest thing I got out of that was I learned how to find the information that I needed. I'm really good at practical research. I've also learned, working with hybrids especially, that a lot of the research that gets done isn't relevant on its own. You need a huge body of research in order to start making practical decisions or sweeping statements that will help the industry.
I ended up at a job that I thought was going to be my break into a career in the industry with full-time work, but even before that, I had applied for jobs in between harvests and never got hired. I wasn't a 25 year old dude who is six feet tall and two hundred pounds. Then working full time, I got to the point where I realized that the way my creative brain worked didn't really jive with the position I was in. I had a lot of big ideas and was shunted into the lab management corner, which was really stifling. I got laid off from that job and thought, you know—I'm not really sure California's right for me.
I ended up getting a job at Gallo my last year in California, which was fabulous. It was so corporately fulfilling. I learned how to solve all of these different problems that I'd never seen before. Like—what do you do when you’re making Chardonnay and 5% of your thousands of barrels are mousey? That's a lot of wine. A lot of times you add stuff—you add tannins that can mask off flavors. At Gallo is where I learned how important blending is, because really the only thing you could do with mouse is blend it out into a bigger lot and hide it. It’s diluted so much that it's no longer perceptible, but it's still risky. You can't blend it in something that you want to age for 10 years, because you don't know if that biological load will increase again and you'll get more mouse, but if you've got a wine that you know will be consumed in 18 months, hell that's the perfect place to put a significant amount of wine into!
When I was in New York [for Jahdé Marley’s Anything But Vinifera conference], we talked a lot about what makes the wine industry sustainable. I think financial sustainability around running a small business gets overlooked in the grand storytelling scheme of wine. The people running the businesses still have to run a business. Figuring out how to work around issues is important. Gallo gave me a lot to think about around problem solving.
That’s why I don't talk about myself as a natural winemaker. I find a lot of value in making pragmatic decisions early on to save a huge struggle later, or to prevent you from releasing a wine that's flawed, because that's unacceptable for me.
Margot: What kinds of pragmatic decisions do you mean?
Erin: Inoculating with yeast, for example. Right now the only things I've added are yeast and sulfur, and the yeast doesn't even get added across the board. I think I had two lots out of forty last year where I added yeast. These are single barrels, mostly for blending decisions. There are a couple of yeasts that I really think do a good job. Sulfur is a very powerful tool. I only add sulfur once or twice over the course of the wine's lifetime. Right now I don’t have to be very aggressive about it, but I do use it.
In the past, when I was getting started with hybrids, I used an enzyme to help break down Brianna, which is really gummy and hard to work with. That was a logistical decision to save my physical health and sanity. I used a little bit of tannin the first year, because I was caught up in the “hybrids don't retain tannin and you have to have tannin to have a balanced wine” thing. That's just not true. I may have added some bentonite, but a lot of stuff that's an additive in winemaking has been used for so long—people eat bentonite as a health food.
Margot: What made you come back to Wisconsin to work with hybrids?
Erin: It was really clear even working with Gallo that I was not going to be able to explore avenues in the industry on the timeline or the way that I wanted to. It took until I could figure out how to continue my career in Wisconsin, to be able to let go of California. I didn't think it was necessarily worth it to move to Oregon or Washington, because I would have to start over similarly, since I didn't know anybody in those spaces. I struggled with it a lot. I thought about moving back and working with cider. I thought about learning how to make cheese.
Then thanks to Gallo, it came together. They have a research vineyard with hybrids in it right next to a Pinot Noir vineyard I was out sampling at right around harvest. They had Chardonel, Chambourcin, Dornfelder, some oddball grapes. I realized that the grapes that were growing there could grow in Wisconsin, and there's nothing wrong with them. They're perfectly legitimate grapes to work with. The fact that I'd never had a wine from the Midwest that spoke to me had less to do with the grapes and more to do with with the process of growing them.
I had a really well made wine, a local wine recently. It was a St. Pepin and it was identifiable as a St. Pepin. There was the typicity thing that people talk about with vinifera, but it was oaked, so it appeals to people who love that oaky flavor. It's a very successful wine because it tastes the way it was intended to, but it didn't spark any imagination. It didn't take it a step further, and that's what I try to do with my wines. It's not easy. It's like my brain won't stop moving. This is the hardest job I've ever had in the industry—and it's not just because I'm running a business.
It's not just about what am I gonna do today and then we'll see what happens tomorrow. I’m thinking—how is this going to affect the life of this wine over time? Nobody knows what that life could look like yet because none of these grapes are old enough and none of these bottlings have been aged long enough. Deirdre [Heekin, the winemaker of La Garagista, who works with hybrid grapes out of Vermont] did a retrospective tasting recently—she's the only one who has a catalog of wines that go back that far where she can understand her sites and what her winemaking does with these grapes.
Margot: That’s amazing. That’s a tasting I would have loved to go to. Which hybrid grapes do you farm?
Erin: I don't personally farm because I don't have time right now. I’m the marketing team, the event planning team, the hospitality team, the sales team. Before I committed my time, I wanted to have a pretty good sense of how I wanted to farm things, and I’m getting there. I also am very aware that all of the growers I work with are getting close to retirement age, and there's no succession planning for these vineyards. Most of these vineyards are planted at people's homes. When the homeowner sells, the vineyards go with it.
Margot: It’s a similar situation in Maine—it’s unsettling.
Erin: Exactly. Whether or not whoever buys it wants to farm grapes, you've suddenly lost the twenty or so years of experience that person had, handing it over to somebody who doesn't know anything and they think it's going to be easy. I work with seven or eight different farmers right now, with almost all Swenson or Minnesota varieties: Brianna, Sabrevois, the Frontenacs, La Crosse, St. Pepin, Somerset Seedless, La Crescent, Marquette, and I do have a very small amount of Petite Pearl and Marechal Foch. Most of them are grown within a three hour radius of the winery. They all have their own personalities, and I don't necessarily know what I'm going to do with it all.
Margot: What is it for you about hybrids? Why work with hybrids?
Erin: I didn't realize this when I left California, but it is very much aligned with some of the social trends in the wine industry and that is, it lowers the barrier to entry into the industry. People who are from minority communities are up against systemic and blatant racism in the industry. Marreya Bailey put her Bathing Collective stats up recently—4% of wineries are owned by women. What do you think that means for the millions of people who are involved in the industry?
For me, working with hybrids let me be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, which meant I had more opportunities to do things my way and be able to make a difference. There's a lot to be said for the community that these hybrids attract, like people who are interested in regenerative farming.
That's not true across the board with hybrids. The old guard has been using them as a way to mimic California, which is still a talking point, like how do we make these wines taste like Cabernet? The people in this subset of hybrid winemaking like Deirdre, and yourself, and Camila and Kalche, there's so many people who are working toward a no synthetic spray future. I still go places that are growing hybrids, but they’re impatient—somebody will say, well, can you grow grapes here? They'll say, no, it's impossible. Well, it's not, you just don't know how to do it, and maybe I don't know how to do it either, but I know it's not by killing things. It’s by creating a balanced system. Part it is also being okay with losing part of your crop every year.
Margot: What does it look like to grow grapes in Wisconsin? What are your soils and pressures like?
Erin: The majority of the state is loose loamy soil of varying depths over limestone. Just north of where I am around the Mississippi River Valley is called the Driftless region. It's very hilly, and the top soil is very thin. I think it's a great spot for grape growing. It's where Organic Valley is headquartered, so there's a lot of organic farms. You get a lot of benefit from the hills, like thermal breezes, birds of prey, good drainage—here we have a lot of water, so we think about keeping humidity down. We want the water to drain away and the wind to dry things out. I think a lot about site selection—there’s some really interesting geology around here.
There are some granitic outcrops. There's different kinds of granite too. There's purple quartzite—Devil's Lake is all purple quartzite. It's one of two places in the entire world where it's found in those quantities. There are some really interesting things out here.
I was talking to, I think it was John McCarroll from Disgorgeous. He said something about like, if you put a map of terroir over a map of population centers, it matches. His point was that terroir has more to do with people and farming it than it does mineral deposits or soil types, and I think that's true. These wines remind me of how they were farmed and the philosophy behind them more than they really say anything about the limestone or silica content.
Margot: That’s really interesting. Kind of like introducing a new mineral through a spray or soil treatment could make your wine taste differently.
Erin: Right. I feel that maybe as we explore American wines, we also redefine terroir for Americans because we're not tied to laws—we can do whatever we want. That is overwhelming, but it's also really freeing.
Margot: I was just talking to someone about this the other day. We’re primed to learn and digest information about wine growing that's based on European findings, standards, histories. We're not Europe—our soils are different, the way we work is different, our cultures are different. I wonder what it would look like to have a WSET or CMS curriculum that is based around America, because I imagine it would be incredibly different from what we’re being taught today. The things we would learn about wine growing and even winemaking would be different if it were based on our own experiences and realities here.
Erin: Yeah, absolutely. Even thinking about trellising systems—it's like people need to constantly reinvent the wheel, even if it's been invented that way before. I was looking at options for Brianna, which is hyper vigorous. I want to make sure that it grows the way it wants to, which I think in a lot of cases probably means bush vines, but then that creates some other problems. I went back and looked at all of these trellising systems, back to historical trellising in the United States for Concord, which I think grows sort of similarly—how they did that and why. There's a lot of generational knowledge out there and people either disregard it or they just do what somebody told them to do without understanding why. It's like forcing the puzzle pieces together and they don't fit.
Margot: Where do you find joy in what you do? What is inspiring in your work?
Erin: Learning brings me joy. I love getting to make a decision about pruning or shoot thinning and then going back and seeing that it worked the way it was supposed to. That's really joyful for me because I get a deeper understanding of the vines themselves. Making the wine has surprisingly taken a backseat because I'm so exacting around what I want to put in the bottle. I find that the action and reaction in the vineyard, and then you've got the wild card of weather—that's probably where the most joy comes from these days.
Margot: That's awesome—I really relate to that personally because I'm starting to realize—I almost hope this isn't the case. I hope I’m wrong and one day I’ll wake up and say well that was silly, but I’m starting to realize that I maybe don't really care about the winemaking part as much as I care about the wine growing part.
Erin: Yeah, it's not a solitary endeavor being in the vineyard. I remember walking through one vineyard and seeing the sheer diversity of animals in it—bugs, caterpillars. I found a tiny green tree frog on a leaf which was just mind blowing. You’re really interacting with the world around you, right? You're not by yourself in the vineyard. In the cellar, you are by yourself. I feel like maybe that's what it is.
Margot: It sounds like farming is really something you're very connected with. Is there a plan to take over a vineyard at some point?
Erin: A loose plan? I don't know if it will be taking over a vineyard because all of them are planted on land that has a house attached, and I can't afford to buy a house on five acres. I am starting to look for undeveloped land and talk to people who have parcels they don't use for anything, which would be better suited to grapes, and seeing if they'll peel off an acre or two. I'm looking into grants and loans for first time minority farmers. There’s a lot to think about, but it's in the plan. I don't know what it's going to look like in five or ten years.
Margot: I’m so excited for what the future holds for you. Thanks so much for taking this time with me.
You can support Erin by buying her wines at American Wine Project, and joining the wine club. Follow her on Instagram, and if you’re local to Wisconsin, stop by the winery—there are often events!
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